With years of experience in CPG marketing, I have been using recipes to grow organic traffic for a long time. I’ve seen the value in recipe content since it was initially implemented in around 2012, but since then I have watched it evolve perfectly for the CPG landscape.
I now work with CPG companies to build year-long SEO strategies around recipe content and equip them with best practices for optimizing and monitoring SEO for recipe content.
Analyze Your Current Recipe Strategy
This is a step that a lot of digital marketing agencies will skip because they assume that strategy doesn’t matter, target everything! And that’s generally correct because the more keywords are the best.
Here are some best practices for creating recipe content strategies:
- See where you are currently ranking
- See where your competitors are ranking
- Find recipes that align with your target demographic
Take a bite out of each of these steps will ensure that you are approaching your recipe strategy intentionally. When it comes to understanding your target demographic, that can be a hard step, and something that I and my team are really good at.
We can look at recipe pockets and discover new groups of people to target based on those. Looking at our recipe schema case study, implementing structured data can quickly boost your organic ranks.
Build Out Your Recipe Schema
There is one basic resource for schema of all sorts, and that is Schema.org. This website contains all of the general information you would need to implement structured data on your site, but I will admit, this can be confusing.
For each type of schema, they provide documentation on how it is structured. This will include the most basic and essential information for all the types of schema. Here are the pieces of information that are needed for recipe schema:
- Cook Time
- This is the time takes to cook the dish. This is used across recipe snippets.
- Cooking Method
- This is the way the recipe is cooked, ie. frying, steaming, baking
- Nutrition
- Nutritional information about the recipe
- Recipe Category
- The category of the recipe ie. entree, appetizer
- Recipe Cuisine
- The cuisine of the recipe ie. French, Spanish, Russian
- Recipe Ingredient
- Single ingredients used in the recipe
- Recipe Instructions
- The steps involved in making the recipes
- Recipe Yield
- The number of servings made by the recipe. This is used across recipe snippets.
- Suitable for diet
- This usually indicates dietary restrictions or guidelines.
Once you have determined what information you need inside of your recipe structured data, you can move to the next step.
Implement on Your Website
This step can be difficult and may require a developer’s assistance. Me and my team can help you out pretty easily, and across any website framework as well! We have implemented schema on Shopify, WordPress, and even Magento websites! If you need help installing recipe schema on any website, contact us for a free consultation today!
